Film Review These ARE THE Dammed

FILM REVIEW – THESE ARE THE DAMMED (1963) hammer films Sometimes issued simply as The Dammed, (its correct English title, with ‘These Are’ added to the American version. For once the alternative title is an improvement. It adds to the film’s understated poetic serious intelligence. The low budget Hammer horror film is often confused erroniously with The Village Of The Dammed and its sequels, (all based on John Wyndham’s The Midwhich Cuckoos). This stand-alone under-rated gem may well be one of the saddest, bleakest, most pessimistic horror stories ever presented. I’m adding spoiler alerts here as the films genuinely shocking finale will be covered in some detail. Starring Shirley Anne Field, MacDonald Carey and a young Oliver Reed, the film looks initially like a teen-rebel beach film about juvenile delinquency. It’s dark science fiction themes are kept very low key at first.  As it begins a young attractive woman (Field) makes advances on an older man (Carey) on the streets of the real English seaside town, Weymouth, but she is only luring him into a petty violent mugging by her Teddy boy brother (Reed) and his loyal gang of biker friends.  Te opening scenes as the trap is set up with the cool jazzy song, Black Leather Rock, (written by Johnny Mercer) playing on the soundtrack, which is still ultra-cool decades later. The Teddy boy biker gang seen throughout the film takes up the catchy song as a signalling call before attacking anyone. There is then quite a slow lull in the film as various background figures are introduced.  The dramatic pace is lost for a time. We meet a mysterious ministry figure that tells his sculptress wife that he dare not tell her what his work actually involves because it could get her killed if she was ever to know. Her eerie sculpture work, (designed by major artist, Elizabeth Frink) depict images of people burnt in nuclear explosions and creates a prophetic glimpse of the damnation awaiting most of the film’s characters). Field meets up with Carey again, and they initially get on well, but when her brother’s gang again attack, she escapes to sea with Carey in his boat. Reed vows revenge.  The gang track the boat’s course and progress from the cliffs along the coast.  (captured with some fine cine-photography) Field confides in her rescuer that her brother is fiercely over-protective to her, (he seems positively incestuous in his fixation on his sister) and that he keeps her from finding a boyfriend even though she is in her early twenties. He even locks her in cupboards to punish her. Carey is sympathetic but proves to be rather too lecherous for the young woman, so she insists he takes her back ashore after he tries making a pass at her. They briefly visit the sculptress’s home, where Reed later vandalizes some of the work, and makes a lacklustre attempt to molest the sculptress, demonstrating both his intimidating and impotent nature. Giving further pursuit, the gang chase the couple into the grounds of a private military establishment.  The minor gang members are all captured by British army soldiers, interrogated and, as they genuinely know nothing, released unharmed. One gang member wants to know more about what has happened to his friends and so he follows clues that take him back to the sculptress, who heads to the base with him to try to find out at last what her husband is up to. Reed, Field and Carey run from the army and fall over the cliffs into the sea, and are initially dismissed as drowned, but they find themselves rescued by a group of nine mysterious children who draw them into a closed off isolated secret scientific base within a cave. Here, the men, Carey & Reed, are forced to reluctantly work together to solve the mystery and escape.  The naïve but intelligent children believe they are on a spaceship bringing them to Earth.  Bernard, the ministry man married to the sculptress, teaches them through TV screens. The children have never directly met any humans before, and wonder if the trio they rescued are their parents.  Ominously, the only other living thing the children saw was a stray rabbit they took in as a pet until it took ill and died in their presence.  The adults are now already showing signs of the same illness. They learn that the children are stone cold to touch. Reed is convinced the children are dead and becomes terrified of them. The grown ups decide to lead a break out from the surveillance camera saturated establishment, and the children help. They encounter army men dressed in radiation suits, and capturing a Geiger counter, they make a shocking discovery – the children are highly radioactive. When the adults capture Bernard (played by Alexander Knox) they establish the full story. An accident in some experiment left the children totally immune to the effects of radioactivity, but highly contagious to ordinary people and all living things. Bernard and his team believe nuclear war will inevitably kill humanity off so the children are being protected as the only hope for humans to survive after the bombs fall.  He tries to warn the reluctant heroes that they are now as good as dead from the radiation they have taken after such prolonged contact with the children. Bernard even fears he himself might be doomed from his own limited exposure to them. Reed, Field and Carey break out anyway, trying to take the children with them, but the children are captured and taken back to the cave, kicking and screaming in total terror. The sculptress witnesses this failed break-out and Bernard personally shoots her to protect his terrible secret.   The other adults die of radiation sickness observed by helicopter crew who plan to dispose of their bodies afterwards.  Reed is trying to drive when his sickness overpowers him, and crashes his stolen car into the sea. The film’s final harrowing image is of the now unseen children being heard screaming for help from within the cliffs as the holiday makers of Weymouth enjoy the Sun oblivious of their fate.

The film’s poster is probably the most misleading I have ever seen. It depicts the children as zombie like entities, and bears the tagline legend “Children of ice and darkness… They are the lurking unseen evil you dare not face alone!” The children are far from evil. They are very much the innocent victims here, and with the exception of the sculptress, (Viveca Lindfors), the film lacks any morally decent honourable adult characters. Field is willing to assist in crimes, her rather pervy lover is clearly too old for her and the gang, as well as its leader, Reed, remain hoodlums to the end.  The most complex figure is Bernard, aware of the mindless violence of the delinquent gang, but seeing his own sinister actions as a necessary evil and a means to an end. He seems to genuinely care for the children he imprisons. He educates them with Byron’s poem The Prisoner Of Chillon, which is as much a reference to his own fate as theirs. He laments having to take them back to the cave after their brief escape, as he now knows he can’t deceive them into thinking they have any freedom or hope any more.  Their happy sense of Utopian freedom and luxury is over. His shooting of his wife is equally tragic and poignant. An ambitious, flawed film, mostly spoilt in the dull middle sequence, and its over-fixation on the strange love triangle between its main heroic protagonists, but a film addressing delinquency, sexual repression, conspiracy theory, cold war nuclear menace, un-checked science, art and moral behaviour on many levels in the space of an hour and a half can’t be all bad. The performances by Reed and Lindfors are particularly excellent. Carey alone seems miscast and unbelievable, while the ultimate fate of the children is genuinely shocking. The film suffered severe censorship cuts, mostly diluting down Reed’s complex emotional incestuous personality. It still leaves the viewer somewhat shaken. The film on Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Damned_%281963_film%29

Arthur Chappell